Buzzsaw fountains were one of my favorite challenges in my first year of spinning poi and it wasn't until much later that I realized they were creating some of the basic skills necessary to get into inversions and barrel rolls later. Here is how you can practice this type of movement and get set up inside moves.

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So here's an interesting thing you can do with plane bending: if you displace a 4-petal antispin flower in three dimensions such that it changes plane as it enters and exits a petal, you wind up creating an interesting illusion wherein from one perspective it continues to look like a 4-petal antispin flower but from another it looks like a 2-petal inspin flower. You can use this, then, to create patterns where you're not only spinning a different type of flower from a different perspective, but also a different timing and direction.

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This is kinda retro tech, but it still leads to some fun places. Using static spin vs 1-petal inspin creates a moment that makes for an easy transition to a split-same isolation. You can use that moment to switch to static spin vs 1-petal inspin with each hand's role reversed or any number of patterns that use linear isolations through the body center.

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A few weeks ago, Alex Powell uploaded a great video of some interesting hybrids utilizing toroids in an atomic configuration. I started working on these same hybrids in other timing and direction combinations as well as some pendulum-based toroid hybrids after taking a pendulums class from Ronan in Tahoe. Here are the results.

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A grab-bag of hand-switching throws I've either been working on or have encountered in the past couple months. The first is a triquetra vs pendulum hand switch Noel came up with during the same spin jam where I started working on the triquetra vs pendulum throw from the last tech blog. The second is a hand-switch that comes out of a snake that I've had a hell of a time getting clean these past few months. The third is a hand-switch I spotted Matt Cullen using a lot during a spin session he did at PEX Summer Festival.

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At the close of Spring Wildfire, Christian and Baz cooked up this little gem that utilizes some in between spaces. What's curious about it to me is the way it takes atomics and allows you to flatten them into two very different timing and direction combinations depending upon what angle you approach them from.

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By request! How to turn with antispin flowers! It's not as hard as you'd think--if you've done my tutorials on basic turns with poi you'll be right at home as you work up to this type of trick. You're basically looking to execute a tic-tac and then perform a petal in between each one. Expand out the size of your hand path and voila! You get turns with antispins :)

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H/T to Thomas Johannson for this one, too! Thomas took the snaking fountain I'd worked up a few weeks ago and took it into a split opposites place. Cool as this was, I also realized it bore some strong similarities to a pattern I've seen Alien Jon do on occasion as well.

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A follow-up to last weeks video on the triangle third-order antibrid. I started modeling the shapes that are generated by putting various third-order motions over antispin flowers and came up with some intriguing results. Here are third-order antibrids for cateye, triquetra, 4-petal antispin, and an inspin version of the triquetra one.

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